Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Why Scriptural Geology Failed in the 1800's
GRISDA has a paper by Warren Johns explaining why he thinks that scriptural geology failed in the 1800s. It has some good ideas. Here are his suggestions:
- Restricting flood layers to higher and higher portions of the geologic record
- Lack of human fossils in geologic strata
- The shift away from the hard facts of geology by the scriptural geologists
- The major journals and educational institutions were hostile to traditional religious beliefs
- The professionalization of geology made it difficult for part-time geologists (such as the scriptural geologists) to have a voice
- Liberal theology was replacing orthodox theology as the dominant view
Monday, April 28, 2008
Art Chadwick's Dino Dig Site
I found an abstract from a poster session (pg. 49A) given by Art Chadwick on his dino dig site that I thought might be interesting. Not only were they using really cool GPS tech to come up with their maps, they also found the following, which I thought was interesting:
I had listened to his talk at the BSG conference a while back, but did not remember hearing that the bones were sorted by bone size. Anyway, there's lots of interesting information in there.
The mass mortality event is preserved within a normally graded bed in a poorly consolidated claystone or mudstone with large limb bones at the base, grading upward to vertebrae and toe bones at all query sites. The bones universally exhibit little evidence of weathering; abrasion and other transport degredation are also conspicuously absent. The claystone is conformably overlain by fine-grained, well-sorted immature sandstone showing evidence of rapid accumulation. We propose that a large population of ornithopods...was catastrophically decimated and initially accumulated in a nearshore freshwater environment. Subsequently, the disarticulating remains were remobilized and transported basinward to a deeper water setting as a graded bone bed.
I had listened to his talk at the BSG conference a while back, but did not remember hearing that the bones were sorted by bone size. Anyway, there's lots of interesting information in there.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Probability
If you are interested in probability, I think you'll find this blog post very interesting. The comments are also good.
For Intelligent Design purposes, _both_ the frequentist and bayesian outlooks on probability are important. The bayesian outlook is important in examining search strategies of cells for new genome configurations. When searching for a solution, you use probabilities as a way of separating out what you do and don't know.
However, I think that the frequentist outlook is also important. The generation of numbers which form probability curves is important, and I believe it belongs to a general feature of nature which can supply randomized numbers according to probabilities in order to maintain balance within nature.
For Intelligent Design purposes, _both_ the frequentist and bayesian outlooks on probability are important. The bayesian outlook is important in examining search strategies of cells for new genome configurations. When searching for a solution, you use probabilities as a way of separating out what you do and don't know.
However, I think that the frequentist outlook is also important. The generation of numbers which form probability curves is important, and I believe it belongs to a general feature of nature which can supply randomized numbers according to probabilities in order to maintain balance within nature.
